06-14-2005, 02:46 AM
Quote:No. I don't give up on it - on the contrary I consider it to be more valid than most sources. I don't however consider original. I do believe there are works within it that are tampered with. Some have said there might not be any untampered or polluted texts that capture the original meaning of the authors in existence.
Smart people in these areas look for originality and question anything that appears to be wrong. You questioned an area that I had not yet thought to look into, the baptism ending of Matthew. To me, it gives credence to my claims that the syriac was a translation off the greek, as it promotes the sacramental liturgy of the catholic church, just like the greek manuscripts do. There was a site that had a great portion of evidence on this, I'll have to find it again.
I do give the syriac some credit though, it looks like the greek manuscripts used in a portion of the books were chosen carefully, and they are viable for comparisons.
Translations off the greek and latin have been happening on and off throughout the centuries. The 12th century hebrew translations promoted by Trimm and others, look more and more to be from latin, as scholars have already claimed, numerous syriac translations come from the greek, armenian, coptic, etc.
No matter how much one petitions for an older date on these things, the dating hand has been pretty steady throughout the years, our oldest sources are still the greek and latin manuscripts, especially greek, with mega-amounts of history behind it. That is your closest source to the original anyone has been able to find yet.
Whatever the source was, the greek does lend itself to viewing a semitic source in various books and portions within books, and people have been taking opportunities to reverse engineer this for quite some time over the years, the bad thing is that there are people running around claiming originality on these very creations and duping The Lord Jesus's people over it at times. When you try to show these hucksters their wrong, they run around with their hands on their ears yelling lalalalala.
What amazes me even more is how whole denominations can be duped over these things so easily, can we say Morman church and Messianic communities? I thought we could. These people approach it so honestly and truthful to whole groups of people, they lobby for various things on the internet over it, that one gets very easily mislead over it.
Trimm had loads of people believing his proofs, and people like him will only get worse as time progresses. He made it so easy to believe in his messianic stuff, I think after a while that people just wanted to believe in it no matter what. I had to take a double take in a few areas myself.
If one is not actively pursuing answers from GOD on these things and truly waiting for HIS answer, they will be mislead, but they will be shown the truth eventually though, if they are HIS children, the Lord Jesus is the good shepard.
Anyways, I get people riled up easily on this subject so I do not want to really argue these facts with them on here anymore, it's a deadend, but GOD is able to show them also, I'm no better than they over this. If they ask HIM, they will receive also.